Understanding Why Smart Playlists Are Called Smart

You create a smart playlist by defining a set of criteria based on any number of different attributes.
After you have created these criteria, iTunes chooses songs that meet those criteria and places them in the playlist. An example should help clarify this. Suppose you are a big-time Elvis fan and regularly add Elvis music to your Library. You could create a playlist and manually drag your new Elvis tunes to that playlist. But by using a smart playlist instead, you could define the playlist to include all your Elvis music. Anytime you add more Elvis music to your Library, that music would be added to the playlist automatically.
You can also base a smart playlist on more than one attribute at the same time. Going back to the Elvis example, you could add the condition that you want only those songs you have rated four stars or higher so that the smart playlist contains only your favorite Elvis songs.
As the previous example shows, smart playlists can be dynamic; iTunes calls this live updating. When a smart playlist is set to be live, iTunes changes its contents over time to match the criteria. If this feature isn’t set for a smart playlist, that playlist will contain only those songs that meet the criteria at the time the playlist was created.
Finally, you can also link a smart playlist’s conditions by the logical expression All or Any. If you use an All logical expression, all the conditions must be true for a song to be included in the smart playlist. If you use the Any option, only one of the conditions has to be met for a song to be included in the smart playlist.

Becoming a Musical Genius with Smart Playlists

The basic purpose of a smart playlist is the same as a standard playlist—that is, to
contain a collection of songs to which you can listen, put on a CD, and so on.
However, the path that smart playlists take to this end is different from standard
playlists. Rather than choosing specific songs as you do in a standard playlist, you
tell iTunes the kind of songs you want in your smart playlist, and it picks out the
songs for you and places them in the playlist. For example, suppose you want to create
a playlist that contains all of your Classical music. Rather than picking out all
the songs in your Library that have the Classical genre (as you would do to create a
standard playlist), you can use a smart playlist to tell iTunes to choose all the
Classical music for you. The application then gathers all the music with the genre
Classical and places that music in a smart playlist.